Are Your Potential Readers Better Than Your Current Readers?

I found myself at the bank last week standing in a line for around 5 minutes waiting for a cashier. While waiting, I turned around and saw several other people sitting on leather seats talking to the bank staff. Why was I standing while they were sitting? They were new customers, of course. The bank already had my money, and already had my account. Leather was too high of a standard for existing customers like me.

Your blog may be acting in a similar fashion. Because of the popularity of the blogosphere, many bloggers focus on luring in readers in order to let them roam free around their blogs. Such blogs fail to create any extra incentives for readers who have already found those blogs. Instead, such blogs focus on getting new readers to come along and join the crowd. The real prize for many blogs, it seems, is the population that lies outside of the growing crowd that exists within the blog.

In this article, we will go through the question: Are your potential readers better than your current readers?

What do many banks, airline companies and your blog have in common?

Airline companies also act similar to banks in many areas. New membership program customers get free miles, while existing customers cannot get any kind of refunds once arriving at a destination in a completely dissatisfying trip. Like dozens of companies in the airline industry where new customers are treated better than existing customers, an increasing number of blogs are treating blog readers depending on their loyalty freshness.

If a reader is not yet a loyal blog reader, the blogger will respect and communicate with that reader a lot, offering incentives in return for that readers’ continued and confirmed visits in the future. For such bloggers, once there is a confirmed reader, it is time to move on and appeal to a new reader instead of satisfying and giving back more to the current reader.

Promising readers gold for their RSS subscriptions

There are RSS buttons all over blogs, asking readers to subscribe to RSS feeds. But when a reader subscribes, the reader only gets the information they were already getting, and less attention. “Subscribe” to this, reply to that, post for this, read for that. Everyone is calling for an action to get in the line, and once a prospect blog reader becomes an existing blog reading by performing the called upon action, nothing further usually comes back to that now-existing-blog-reader other than the same content and an automated form of “thank you!”

Current readers get no benefit for being active readers

Why are there no new incentives for current readers, instead of new readers? Why are there no giveaways and contests where a current reader does not have to do anything more for the blogger? Many contests online focus on bringing in more traffic instead of focusing on making existing users become more loyal.

There are almost no managers to complain to in the blogosphere. You don’t like a blog? You will most probably be told to not visit that blog anymore. Of course, all of your energy, time and clicks spent promoting that blog directly or indirectly will be ignored, and you will not be rewarded in the end if you decide to walk out on a blog. The blogosphere can be a very cold place, and yet such a fact is not disclosed when readers are invited to RSS subscriptions, to comments, to posts and to more visits. Everything looks great as long as you are in the process of becoming a new reader.

Are you focusing only on turning new readers into current readers?

Is your blog, whether corporate or personal or both, focusing solely on getting more new readers to join your fan base? Do you offer incentives that all existing readers can enjoy automatically?

Where is the appreciation for existing readers on your blog?

Please share your comments, experiences or tips in the comments below. Thank you!